“After enduring civil war for years, will there be any promise of a better state of things than we now enjoy?” Houston wrote in a November 1860 letter preserved among documents at his namesake museum in Huntsville.

A secession convention that assembled in Austin 150 years ago this weekend rejected the Texas governor’s advice.

“I think everybody pretty much knew what was coming,” said Mac Woodward, curator of collections at the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville.

Stoked by unfounded fears and erroneous reports of slave rebellions that became known as the Texas Troubles, Texans in February 1861 approved secession by a 3-1 margin, sending the state barreling toward the Civil War on the losing side and costing Texas hero Houston his job. The only Unionist governor in the South would be removed when he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy.

Texas became the seventh state to secede and the last to join the Confederate States of America before the war started that April.

The Texas defection came despite the blocking efforts of Houston, the state’s most prominent national figure at the time. He was a hero as leader of the Texas forces that won independence from Mexico in 1836, a two-time president of the Republic of Texas, a state legislator, congressman and senator. Before arriving in Texas, he’d also been governor of Tennessee.

“Here you have a governor, Sam Houston, who continues to say the Union must be preserved, that Texas is better off in the Union,” said T. Michael Parrish, a Baylor University history professor whose specialties include Texas and Southern history and the Civil War.

“The summer and fall of 1860, he stumped the state and uttered phrases: ‘Rivers of blood will flow; the South can’t win; if we do secede, we should become our own nation,'” Parrish said.

Houston also spoke out against Jefferson Davis, the provisional president of the Confederacy and a man he knew from their days together in the U.S. Senate.

“They did not like one another; they did not trust one another,” Parrish said. “Sam Houston predicted Jefferson Davis would lead the Confederacy to disaster.”

Sam Houston State University

President Sam Houston

Houston refused to call the Legislature into special session to consider secession, but backers of the idea circumvented him, picked delegates for a secession convention and assembled Jan. 28 in the House chamber. According to accounts from the Texas State Library, Houston, working below them in his first-floor office, described them as “the mob upstairs.”

On Feb. 1, delegates voted 166-8 to secede.

When a Committee of Safety was authorized by the convention to seize all federal property in the state, Houston summoned Texas Rangers loyal to him to intercept a posse headed to a federal arsenal in San Antonio. But the commander of U.S. forces in Texas surrendered all military property in the state, and a week later the public vote approved the secession convention actions.

“Ultimately, the Legislature said: ‘Well, we’ll just fix you,’\u2009″ Woodward said. “‘We’re going to have all the state officials pledge their allegiance to the Confederacy.’ That was what he would not do, the one thing he would not do.”

On March 15, the governor’s office was declared vacant, and Lt. Gov. Edward Clark was sworn in as governor of the Confederate state of Texas.

Houston eventually supported Texas’ move to the Confederacy.

“When the people voted, he had to live with that,” Woodward said. “That was his belief.”

Records are spotty, but somewhere between 70,000 and 90,000 Texans, more than 10 percent of the state’s population, served in the Confederate Army. Among them was Houston’s son, Sam Jr., who was wounded at Shiloh and wound up in a prisoner-of-war camp in Illinois. The Houston museum has a Bible he carried, featuring a bullet hole that goes halfway through the book.